Things happen 5, June 17th 2013

I was in at UCLH this morning, today was the big day, I would be receiving the stem cells collected back following a high dose of melphalan – another mustard gas derivative that is nasty and evil enough to kill of lots of the remaining myeloma cells.

I cant describe to you the psychological import of this, I’d been working toward this point since I was diagnosed in November last year, and the last couple of days had been particularly difficult, anticipation, fear, sleeplessness.

I had the usual round of blood tests and waited for the doctor to drop by to sanction the chemo; I was called into a side room and waited. Unusually, the duty doctor was accompanied by the esteemed professor; something was wrong here. So what transpires is this, the lab had used the wrong preservative on the stem cells they’d collected last week. All 8.7 million of them were tainted and I will have to go through the stem cell mobilisation and collection process all over again. For some sense of the horror of this read here, here, here and here.

In addition my latest MRI results are ambiguous to my interpretation anyhow and I’ve asked for some analysis back. Some of the lesions appear to have stopped developing but others have appeared.

This is very distressing.

Here’s the data:

For detailed description of parameters see the Data Methods part of this website

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Comments

Tom, your work here is raw and beautiful. I’m sorry this is happening. Your courage shows me that we should all take a closer look at ourselves. Thank you. I’m thinking about you, and I so admire of all of your accomplishments over the last 20 years.

Oh Liza it’s so nice to hear from you. I’m glad you like the project, I’m not exactly sure where it’s going but it’s keeping me sane. I love the rugs, there is a real connection to your work as I remember it all those years back – a lovely sensibility of light, structure, texture and colour.